Over the past few years, the amount of content available over the Internet has grown tremendously. Much of the Internet's content is distributed widely across many locations. Therefore, a search engine and/or navigator is required for meaningful retrieval of information. There are numerous search engines and navigators available to search for specific content on the Internet.
Current search engines and navigators are designed to search for text within the text contained in web pages or other files on the Internet or a written description of the web page to be located. A search engine stores the location of a given piece of information and various descriptions of the information in a database that is searchable by a user. Often, the information to be located is itself descriptive.
A search engine may rely upon the content providers to establish both the location of the content and descriptive search terms to enable users of the search engine to find the content. Alternatively, the process of search engine registration is automated. A content provider places a “meta-tag” into their web page or other content. The “meta-tag” contains keywords that a search engine can index the page location upon to enable searching. The “meta-tag” is not displayed by a page reader's web browser software.
A search engine may use a web crawler to search for content on the Internet. The web crawler automatically “spiders” through web pages by following every link from one web page to other web pages until all of the links are exhausted. As the web crawler spiders through pages, the web crawler correlates the descriptive tags on each page viewed with the location of the page to construct a searchable database.
Recently, advances in Internet access have enabled more users to create video and graphic content and to distribute that content over the Internet. Furthermore, video streams are becoming more and more common as a form of content on the Internet. As with text and file content, the increasingly large amount of video and graphic content is distributed widely across many locations, thus creating the need for a search engine and/or navigator for meaningful retrieval of information.
The need to be able to search for video or graphics will only continue to grow as streaming video becomes more available and popular over the Internet or similar information transferral systems, such as on-line services, Intranets, etc. Furthermore, as personal computers and other office or home equipment develop larger and larger memory and storage capacity, the storage of video streams will become even more common and the need for a video search engine (“VSE”) will increase.
Video and graphic content does not lend itself to easy searching because video and graphics often do not contain any text description that can be searched with a currently available navigator or search engine. Furthermore, there is no uniform format for identifying and describing a video or a graphic. Therefore, currently available search engines and browsers are inefficient and unusable for meaningful retrieval of video and graphic information over the Internet. There is currently no easy or direct way to search for a video or to search, display, select, or take action on, video streams. As the usage of video streams becomes even more common, there is a need for a centralized navigator and search engine for video streams.
One object of the present invention is to provide a search engine for graphics and video.